Archive for the 'Sport' Category

You may have heard of TED, an elite technology and science conference where awesome presentations are given in a short format. Similarly, this clip comes to us from GREG, an elite conference in Seattle, the entire schedule of which lasts a mere five minutes, focused on issues of particular interest to rockers.* Curated by Greg Dunlap, Chicago expat, guitarrorist, software developer and longtime pal, GREG ’10 is quite the standout. This year’s topic? How To Not Suck At Pinball, one subject among many a Greg Dunlap, PAPA competitor is eminently qualified to discuss. Neither deaf, nor dumb, and only mildly farsighted, that kid sure plays a mean pinball.

“I have automobile plants in my district. They pay $25 to $35 per
employee per hour,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus (R) of Alabama, ranking
Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. “I am sure that I
am going to be asked, ‘Congressman, I work at Honda or
Mercedes, I make $40 an hour; why are you going to take my taxpayer
dollars and pay it to a company who pays their employees $75 an hour?’

It’s no secret that the south is not fond of unionized labor. The attitude can hardly come as a surprise given that prior to 1865, the south regarded its own labor force as owned property. It’s easy to be in love with the free market when you’re the one with the keys to the ankle cuffs.

For Dixie, the transition from chains to employee handbook has been a troubled one with many victims. Spurred by the current economic crisis, could the south’s most beloved sporting franchise be the next? Put another way, is NASCAR in just as much danger as the UAW?

If the parade of southern Republican drawling heads railing on television against the auto industry bailout is any indication, the answer is a resounding yes. While blaming the unionized labor force entirely for the sorry state of the US auto industry is exactly what you’d expect from business interests on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, this time around the calls to put those uppity line workers in their place are flirting with the very real possibility of wiping out the US automakers’ domination of NASCAR tracks.

Inspect the running order of any NASCAR race and you will find GM products in the vast majority, followed by Chrysler, Ford, and, yes, Toyota. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and creeping free-market globalism to be sure – thanks solely to thirty years of union-crushing by southern Republicans (and the boardrooms and radical libertarian think tanks that paid for their legislation and deregulation.) Blaming the union not only insults the men and women who put together the stock NASCAR vehicles, but it ensures that foreign-owned non-union cars will step into the gaps left by a wiped-out big three.

The irony burns brighter than a cross. The culture most associated with blue-collar pride and bumper-sticker patriotism has been routinely been led by the nose into debacle after debacle — they’ve tolerated local economic devastation, slashed education spending, Iraq. But now, it’s serious: their elected leadership is messing with Chevys at Talladega. Every lie now told about UAW workers being paid $75 an hour serves to ensure more Toyotas at Daytona. Can the south tolerate this latest unintended consequence of blaming the workers?

The infield spectacle of 60-year-old female racing fans taking off their tube tops says “Charger” a lot louder than it says “Camry”, and racing fans seem to know it. With the very essence of NASCAR at stake, will the fans in the stands roll over for business interests again and jeer the union as the big three die off?

I wasn’t expecting to proclaim a favorite National League team this year, but the Million Dollar Arm contest in India settled it for me: I can now be counted among the Pittsburgh Pirates faithful. The storied club of Roberto Clemente, Dock Ellis and Dave Parker can now boast a pitching staff that includes the first two hurlers from the Indian subcontinent ever signed by a major league baseball team, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel.

These guys, 19 and 20 respectively, throw around 90 mph and consistently for strikes. But at writing time, their knowledge of baseball is perfect – perfectly nonexistent. While I look forward to their stint in spring training and what will probably be the Pittsburgh minor league system this season, their Blog and Twitter have already been nothing short of awesome and it’s my bet will only get better. From a couple of days ago:

JB sir [JB Bernstein, Barry Bond’s ex-agent and mastermind of the whole contest] explained to us today about the mind tricking us. He say that brain trick body to do bad sometimes. What we have to do is learn to say no to our brains and tell our arms to just throw. We need no excuses in our mind. Just do our best and rewards will come.

He ask us what we would do if we were throwing Javelin against man who throw farther than our best throw… We then realize that we trick our body to think we can do better than our best to beat other man. That was good way to show us and we understand much better now.

We want to pitch very good. We are working so hard and we are told that we may sign contract next week. When that is true it will be the best day of our lives!

Following the baseball education of these two is going to be incredible.

When Gerard Cosloy invited me to write some stuff for his sports blog Can’t Stop The Bleeding, it took me a while to get in the groove re: the 2005 World Champion White Sox in their ’08 campaign. I guess being a fan of a first-place baseball team isn’t enough to clear the cobwebs. Luckily, fear and loathing has since taken over. Once it sank in that the goddamn Cubs were all the way in it this year, I got to work. I can’t even entertain the idea of staying on the bench for this.

Here then, for those so inclined, are this summer’s screeds so far at CSTB.

So the lady and I took off to Detroit last week to catch the White Sox play the Tigers at Comerica Park. It was our first visit to Motor City, and now I know why.

After the Sox’s 2-1 loss in the 9th inning courtesy of Octavio Dotel’s hung slider to Miguel “Not Orlando” Cabrera, resulting in a home run to left center and 3-game sweep for the Tigers, the crowd filed out onto Woodward Avenue, site of Martin Luther King’s 1963 march. We were sporting Sox black and white colors in a sea of Tiger orange, which prompted the following first-innocuous-then-horrifying exchange:

Group of white Tigers fans: Hey, that sweep’s gotta hurt.

Us: Yeah, Kenny Rogers brought his stuff today. But hey, what’s the use of being out in front of the division if you can’t drop three on the road?

I knew Detroit is a legendarily messed up place. It did not escape my notice that in a city sporting an 81% black population the only African-American faces inside Comerica were behind the concession stands. It wasn’t a surprise that Comerica is a park built for the enjoyment of white suburbanites.

You know, it’s just like Wrigley Field.

Taking in the city at large, the scars of the ’67 riots were plain, as was the whiplash effect of driving north on E Jefferson and crossing Maryland Avenue, of moving from blight (or “bloit”, a term I coined) to manicured lawn in the blink of an eye. The landscape spoke volumes about the sorry situation on the ground. As unintegrated as much of Chicago is, Detroit’s bunker mentality set a standard of white flight that Chicago couldn’t come close to matching, thank god.

Greg Walker, Chicago White Sox batting coach and oft-touted fall guy for the team’s sleepy offense might not have been the one to dream up last night’s profoundly retarded clubhouse exhibit, but I bet nobody’s happier to have his name out of the papers for a few days.

In a move one might better expect from a Duke-graduate Cubs fan planning a bachelor party in Kenilworth, the Sox clubhouse was decorated with a tableau of blow-up dolls and baseball bats. Now get this, some of the hee hee bats were haw haw inserted into the dolls dude!

Yeah, it’s a regular Algonquin Round Table in Major League Baseball.

While the Sox have every right to be concerned about repeating – with depressing exactness – the awful 2007 season of wasted pitching via petulant non-hitting, this is the wrong approach. As badly-needed motivational initiatives go, instead of one reeking of moronity, desperation and latex, I suggest the Sox consider all the options the world of sport has to offer.

Political and religious philosophers agree: left unsaddled by a healthy fear of an angry, magical clerk in the sky, people behave like real assholes. The (Republican) party line goes: given a fraction of a chance, your fellow man will in his natural state show himself to be a pilfering, hoarding dick. And no self-regulation, it is repeated, can interfere with this imperative of narrow self-interest. Without fear of imposed authority, no drinking well remains unpooped-in for long; there is nothing beyond grabbing or ruining, nobody and nothing beyond encroachment. We cannot make the right choices. Our hopeless flaws can be tamed only by laws – of morality, of the market, of the land.

Fuck that, says Will Stewart. The Texan from Austin, accountant, baseball fan and indisputably good person is the guy in the left field stands who caught Chicago White Sox DH Jim Thome’s game-winning 500th home run ball at U.S. Cellular Field on Sunday. Stewart did something unexpected in a decade history will remember for its appalling culture of greed. Ball in hand, fully aware of the (at least $100K) potential dollar value to Thome, Stewart did not grab. To the chagrin of clergy, cops, and commodity traders the country over, Stewart failed to conduct business as usual by opening with a price negotiation.

Instead, Stewart gave Thome the ball. For no price. While the club has showed their gratitude by handing Stewart a pair of season tickets (which he then donated to Thome’s favorite charity) the fact remains Will Stewart passed up a six-figure payday – in 2007 – out of common decency.

“I feel it is a part of Chicago baseball history,” said Stewart, right after handing the ball back to the White Sox slugger during a postgame press conference.